"Back to the roots" mushroom garden kit experiment

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My niece gave me a Back to the Roots oyster mushroom kit for Christmas, fun little kit, but a bit too labor intensive for those of us with jobs, at least in it’s original packaging…

You need to keep the mycelium moist and mist it twice a day, the problem is I would forget to mist it, tiny mushroom fruiting bodies would appear, then dry out…

I needed a way to keep the humidity up, but wouldn’t interfere with my busy schedule…

So, I took one of my empty 10 gallon aquariums and a glass hood, a couple synthetic car wash sponges (brand new and never used) to keep the humidity up, took the kit out of it’s bag, and set it in the aquarium

It worked, and I got a decent crop off the kit, so this got me thinking…

I had a partially depleted BTTR kit, and I wanted to see if I could bring it back to life…

The growth medium for the BTTR kit is used coffee grounds, so I stopped off at a local Starbucks chain and got a bag of their free used grounds they give away for fertilizer, emptied the bag into the aquarium, and sectioned up the BTTR kit, placing the mycyleum sections in a grid on the used coffee grounds

If all goes according to plan, the mycyleum should grow to cover the bed of grounds in the aquarium and I should get a huge crop of tasty oyster mushrooms, and when this batch of grounds is depleted, I’ll just grab another bag of grounds and seed that with the mycyleum from this crop…

2

What a brilliant solution! Thanks for posting this, and I’ll look forward to hearing how your oyster mushroom crop turns out.

3

This makes me want to try growing mushrooms myself. Any suggestions on getting started?

4

I’m guessing the substrate that came in your kit was sterilized before they introduced the spores, to allow the mycelium to colonize it without mold contamination. You might have an issue with mold growing over the coffee grounds before the mycelium can colonize it. I know that this is a huge problem with at least one uh… particular… species of mushroom. It’s possible that oysters are hardier but if you see any fuzzy stuff growing be ready to toss everything out, some of the mold you might get can be really bad for you.